Beautiful Wreck Page 4

  Old Norse words were often round and thick, spoken with the cadence of a lullaby. Voices layered upon one another around the heartstone, phrases rising like questions. Then barks of joy pierced the softness. Clipped tones of irritation. No other language had its range, its ragged roughness and yet its capacity for melody and intimate murmurs.

  I thought I’d immersed myself in this language. But I’d been playing at it. My god, I was hearing the real thing. I closed my eyes and drank in the chief’s voice. Hoarse like gravel sometimes, very grave, but something about it was good.

  Feeling the solid weight of his body on that bench, I wanted things. I wanted to see the gestures that went with the words, to see peoples’ faces when they spoke. I wanted to go to the bathroom, wash my hair, eat. And I wanted to look at the chief again. I remembered every line and detail of his face from the sea. The high forehead, black waves of hair and dark angled brows, knifelike cheekbones, wolfish eyes. I raised my hand to lightly brush the curtain that divided us. I wondered what he was named.

  The men left the house, and even through the curtain I could feel the sigh of readjustment in the way the women talked.

  I sat up and stretched as best I could in the cramped space, and I seized with pain, a thousand needles and aches and pinches. I leaned into the wooden wall and groaned. My fingers tapped on my arm out of habit, but I wasn’t surprised nothing happened, nothing at all.

  I lay my head against the wood and felt its scratchy surface snag my hair. I had no more ideas. I was just here.

  “She needs to get out.” A woman was speaking. She said “the bath,” and something like “it will ease her.” The voice was soft but slightly hoarse, like the scratchy mane I’d clutched last night. A tiny lisp, no more than a push behind esses, so small that no one but me might notice. A formation of the mouth.

  Someone drew the curtain aside and let in the light of a nearby torch and a strangling wave of smoke. Sun reached through a hole in the roof, enough so I could see her clearly. She placed her hand, slim and bony, palm down against the bench near my feet, and she looked at me with pale eyes. Quiet, but not hesitant.

  She was younger than me, maybe by several years. It was hard to tell, because of the light, and because of her hair, both childish and severe. It was pulled tight in two French braids that gripped her head like talons. They made her angular features stand out, accentuated in the lamp light. Nose straight and prominent, high cheekbones, chin like a point. But her lips were full and rounded, a soft mouth for such a sharp face.

  After a moment, she moved her hand farther into the alcove, as if gentling an animal in a cage. It was easy to let her come all the way in. She folded herself like a wading bird, all arms and legs. It was simple to let her sit with her knees drawn up just a few feet away.

  “I am Betta,” she told me. The rich, smoky voice I’d heard outside the curtains now came from those lips, a sensual surprise. She smiled, and her teeth were just a little too big for her mouth. Somehow it softened everything, gawky and charming.

  I smiled too, and breathed in a rush of smoke. The air burned going down. I croaked hello. Mutual intelligibility, I thought. If people who speak different versions of a language can equally understand each other.

  She focused on my mouth, eyes intent and curious, and I wondered if she’d never seen anyone with a gap in their teeth. Her hand twitched in her lap, as though she wanted to reach out and test me. As if where language failed, her fingers could find out what I was. She wasn’t afraid of openly observing.

  “You’re scared,” she said. Everything was stated matter of factly.

  She couldn’t know how deep my fear went, spiraling down inside me like a funnel of dark birds. Varieties of fear. I was insane, definitely. And stranded, abducted by realists? Stuck forever in some twilight of the tank? Or not. Afraid to admit it, my gut knew what was true. I was twelve hundred years from where I began.

  The shaking started again, and I drew five pounds of wool and fur up around me.

  “You have no need to be,” she told me. “The farm is green now. It’s summer, já?” She looked at my blankets, then reached for one and very slowly drew it away. “You need to come outside and breathe.”

  Breathing! The idea of fresh air came to me as if from a long ago story. I’d forgotten about it. There would be clear air outside the house. Air and sun and light. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait. I needed it. Tears sprang up, and I nodded, already gulping for it, singeing my lungs.

  Betta slid to the edge of the alcove and opened the curtains all the way. “Let’s see if you can walk.” Her strong fingers closed on mine, and she helped me out of bed and into the house.

  I stepped into a Viking dollhouse, lit by two dozen lamp fires that twinkled and flared along the walls.

  Benches stretched far away to my right, scattered with gray and white furs and sheepskins, their ends disappearing into the dark, limitless longhouse. In the firelight, the benches and walls were colored in butter and copper. Outside the reach of the small flames, they shifted into shades of rust, plum and darkest brown shadows.

  Objects glinted in angled rays of sun that shot through a vent in the roof. Tools, axes that had been laid carefully aside, women’s knives and needles flashing. Two women sat like spirits in the drifting smoke and revolting stink of body odor and fish. I swallowed hard.

  It was the hjartastein. Heartstone. A word that, in the Viking way, made a tiny poem out of the most ordinary thing. It was the main fire, the center of the living home. An elongated oval of rocks contained it. Sunlight coming through a hole in the roof carved a swirling column of ashes and smoke that rose slowly toward the sky.

  I blinked the sequence to save an image, and a little tear of loss and frustration stung my eye. My contacts were gone, wouldn’t work anymore.

  I searched the room, desperate to take everything in, every detail, for when I got sucked back into the future. I had no idea when it would be. I had to seize this, and I had to do it alone, with just my eyes and mind. I reeled, trying to see and listen and memorize, and when I stepped down out of the alcove I stumbled and my knees hit the ground.

  From the swept-dirt floor I looked up in wonder. Across the way two stories of sleeping spaces were set into the wall, divided by big posts, entire trees holding up the house and dividing tiny sleeping quarters like animals’ dens. Most were enclosed with thin linen curtains, a rusty orange color that glowed almost pink where it was lit.

  A few alcoves on the lower level were open to the room. In one of them, a man slept heavily with his mouth open against the wood bench, his belly crushed against a metal cup and several knives that hung from his belt. One arm bent, his hand rested on his ax blade like it was a lover’s cheek. Other than him, no men were present. Just the two women at the heartstone. They stared.

  I reached blindly for Betta, and she squeezed my hand with her capable fingers, her cool and reassuring palm. She helped me up, and when we both rose to our full heights, she stood an inch or two above. A very tall woman in her place and time, probably five and a half feet.

  She helped me walk the length of the room and through an archway into another. The second room was smaller and paneled with a blond wood that made it shine. I’d read about this! The room for women’s work. At the center, around a smaller fire, were a small clutch of women, vaguely threatening. Two sat spinning on glowing blond benches. The third paced with a baby at her breast, whispering to it and kissing its white head. Its soft hair waved with her breath. Betta didn’t introduce me, and I was grateful. They nodded, a couple smiled, and we moved on.

  A door stood at the end of the room, all golden wood with iron hinges and a little gable with crossed dragon heads above it. A child’s dream door. Something breathtaking and special should be on the other side, like a world made of candy. And it was.

  The mudroom at the back of the house was a great profusion, lit with the same little wall lamps stuck into the dirt walls here and there. They illuminated a rich and abundant lif
e. Dozens of wool cloaks hung from pegs, leather boots lined up below, a tall stack of big bowls, so many baskets, tools, brooms. Bows and arrows hung on the wall, next to a pair of long, curved blades and a string of blunt ax heads, everywhere lay knives and axes and other bits of metal made for cutting. One corner was filled of wooden handles of every length from hatchet-sized to taller than Jeff. Another corner was stacked with crude snowshoes and long, flat slats that were the skið I had read about—snow skates—like thin wooden skis. Low benches lined the back wall, one piled high with folded blankets and sheepskins. Under the bench, a small wooden sword and tiny shield lolled, forgotten. The home’s true heart was not the fire pit, but here.

  The room was chaotically alive and yet neat as a tack. A house run strictly but bursting with love, kept in order by a good wife. Maybe it was the one with the babe. Had she worn keys at her waist? A pang of emotion erupted in me, an anger so sharp that I staggered onto the bench. Who did she think she was, the woman who kept this house so beautiful? I was confused. Shocked at myself. Frustrated and mad at being lost and weak. This was a gorgeous home, bigger, more extravagant and comfortable than any longhouse I’d imagined, and I was lucky, so very lucky.

  My head was a dead weight in my hands.

  A little girl with long, brown braids knelt in front of me. “Come Lady, are you alright?”

  I lifted my raw eyes to her, and she told me she was Ranka, exactly six. Betta knelt beside Ranka, looking speculatively between my feet and a little pair of leather ankle boots. I noticed my own by the door, two salt-watered lumps. She pursed her lips, matching my foot to a sole. Ranka gave advice in a sing-song voice about girls with growing feet.

  Besides the way we came through, there were two other doors. One went outside, I assumed. Another had a complex iron latch. And there was also a passageway—a simple opening in the floor with steps going down into the earth, extending into a dark, unknowable interior.

  I stood and wobbled, reached out my hand for the latched door, and Betta and Ranka nearly knocked each other over scrambling to pull me away. “Nei!” Ranka’s eyes were wide. “We do not go there.” I let them steer me away and down the dark stairs into the earth.

  The tunnel wasn’t frightening. Just high and wide enough that Betta and I could walk comfortably, it looked like something built by friendly elves. Betta let Ranka hold a small torch, and I winced when she waved it too close to my face. We hardly needed it. In less than half a minute we could see a square of light where the tunnel ended. It was a charming little door with a paneless window cut out of the top half. We seemed to be inside a hill, and right ahead of me I could see the clean air.

  I stepped out, and the sun off a million blades of grass slashed at my eyes. I cried out, covering them with my hands. I opened my fingers slowly, and when I was able to look, the world was stunning. We stood in a small bowl in the land, and emerald hills climbed everywhere, up from us in every direction. The grass grew down off them and right onto the roof of the tunnel door. The grass yielded to soft moss all over the stones at our feet. A circular, sea green pool sat calmly, waiting, glittering. And we were in the green. It wasn’t something seen against a screen or a white tile or metal tabletop. It was around us.

  Betta took me farther past the pool, to a place where I could go to the bathroom. The future word stood out in my mind as ridiculous, given the circumstances—this bath that stood without walls, under the sky, a “room” that was no more than a private space in the bushes near a stream. In privacy, I took my dry contacts out of my eyes, rolled them up and stashed them in the cylinder of my needle case.

  Then I floundered, figuring out what to do with my bundle of skirts. Grass scratched and tickled. So different from my apartment, I could barely comprehend what I was doing. Where I had come.

  When we got back to the pool Betta started ordering me around, and her exaggerated gentleness dissolved into easy camaraderie. “Afkloeði, Kona,” she demanded. Off with your clothes, Woman. I burst out laughing at how much she sounded like Jeff. I would have to teach him that one.

  My laugh stuck in my throat. Jeff. I wondered when I’d see him again. Would I be whisked out of this scene, back to the lab, at any moment—the wrenching metal in my brain as unexpected and fast as last time?

  Betta’s toothy smile drew me back. She was easy and sweet, and when she smiled she was beautiful. Not pretty at all. She held the promise of later grace, of becoming gorgeous with age, growing into her wide eyes and learning to loosen her hair.

  She helped me with my dress and got my shift off over my head. Belt, needles, necklace all heaped on the rocks. Holding onto her arm, I stepped into the pool, expecting it to be pleasantly warm. But it was almost hot, just on the edge of comfort. It was luscious, and I sank gratefully down into it and it cradled me.

  We had a spa at the lab, a floating, melted space inside the heart of the glacier, but none like this. I’d never seen a pool that sat like a tiny bowl under a peach and moss-colored sky. I tilted my head back and an immense weight of openness—a sky unbroken by steel and glass—pressed down on me like a heavy blanket. So big. I breathed slowly, calming myself. I brushed my thigh, and the water was like silk on my skin. I gripped the silty bottom with my toes and played with the resistance against my hand as I swiped the surface. Mesmerized.

  “Have you not had a bath before, Lady?”

  Ranka sat cross-legged on the stones at the edge of the pool, her head so far to one side she was dipping a braid in the water. Her brows were scrunched into a tight V, a very adult look of concern on her face.

  What did she think of me? As new and amazing as this pool was to me, I realized that’s what I was to her. Ranka’s world must have been small. Unbelievably small. I was the one glittering new thing that would come along probably in her entire childhood. She wanted to be part of me, of the occurrence of “Ginn.”

  Worry crept over me and a chill shot through my bath. She was a child, open and intrigued, but what would the adults think? Where did they suppose I’d come from? I pictured myself lying on the black sand, my dress like a splash of blood against the dark. I had no explanation, and that seemed dangerous.

  I floated over to the edge and asked if Ranka would do my hair.

  “I will see what I can do,” she told me in a scolding voice, and Betta and I glanced at each other and stifled our laughter.

  While I soaked, Betta swished her feet in the pool, and Ranka bathed my forehead with a linen cloth dipped in some sweet smelling water she’d mixed with flowers. White sprigs like bits of Queen Anne’s lace bobbed and swirled in her soapstone bowl. Snjorbloms she called them. Snow blooms. The farm wife had used that word in her diary, and now I knew it was angelica, before the Christians and botanists brought such notions to this place.

  Ranka wiped my temples and the back of my neck, moving my hair around in soggy ropes. She talked in her little voice about how she would one day have jewelry like mine, and about feeding horses and learning to cut and sew a shirt for her father. It was a very big shirt. Soon she would need her own new dress, she was so tall.

  She combed my hair with a beautiful comb, bigger than my hand. It had a curving back and delicate teeth, each one carved from bone. It gently scraped my scalp, waking up a million tingles and itches. I’d been sleeping on a hard bench, my hair damp and matted with sand. Every stroke of the comb made me feel a bit more human. Ranka industriously and carefully worked at the tangles, obviously proud that she was helping to wake me up and get me “ready.” She dipped the comb in the water and ran it down my hair, and I leaned forward so she could comb all the way down my back. Bunched with worry, I wondered. “Ready” for what?

  She asked if she could wear my necklace someday, and I said yes, as long as she would tell me what this place was.

  She paused. I’d said something strange.

  “Já well, you’re at Hvítmörk!”

  This was meant to thoroughly answer the question. And her tone strongly suggested I should be t
hrilled. Yes, I should know what Hvítmörk was. White Woods. It must be the name of the farm that lay before me, where these people worked and lived, where the chief went this morning when he left the house. The place I would eventually go, when this bath was through. It was a farm full of people who would expect me to behave in all the normal ways they did, and to know every common thing they did, let alone know where I’d come from and what had befallen me. How could I tell them? It was unthinkable. I didn’t understand it myself.

  Ranka went on about her little girl topics. She talked about everyone on the farm, and I could hardly comprehend or remember any of it. She had an urgent need to tell me everything she’d ever absorbed or thought. I could feel her unstoppable will to grow, and to be, and it made me ashamed of hiding back in that bed for even a minute. My heart filled with her excitement, and I breathed the fresh air and smelled grass and dirt, more vivid and animal than any city park. Bliss and pure wonder coursed in my veins.

  Then she was talking about me.

  “I heard that you came from the sea,” she said. My worry came back, a sudden hard ball in my stomach. She went on, oblivious to me. “My Da found you.”

  An unaccountable feeling stabbed at my heart. My voice came out smaller than I intended. “I thank him, then.”

  “Já … ” She trailed off, and the silence was stark after so much chatter.

  She wanted to ask me something. I could hear it in the echo of her yes, the inflection that lingered in my ears, and I could feel her swaying back and forth on her knees while she arranged the wet hair around my shoulders. Finally she burst out, “So are you sent by the goddesses or not?”

  Betta and I laughed out loud, then looked at each other and smiled. I thought of the programming team, of Jeff, and he was no goddess. “I don’t think so.”

  Ranka’s father had found me at the ocean. She was his child, then. She was a bright and wonderful girl. So why did it make my heart hurt to know that she was his?